The widget works with videos captured and uploaded via Twitter’s iOS and Android apps as well as its Twitter Amplify partners, which include Viacom, BBC Global News, Fox TV, CBS, McDonald’s, Verizon, and the NFL.

Twitter launched its native video experience in January after first teasing it a couple months prior. It enables Twitter users to capture,edit, and share videos from its mobile apps. You can capture and share videos up to 30 seconds.

Twitter video is still in its infancy, so it will be interesting to see how widely adopted it becomes, particularly among marketers. Facebook video has blown up over the past year, and Twitter is no doubt looking for a similar trend, even if not on such a grand scale.

Twitter has long been a great place to find embeddable content for blog posts. Embeddable tweets have been around for much longer than embeddable Facebook posts. With videos now part of that mix, it’s a nice expansion of the options available to bloggers and journalists.

The offering can only help Twitter expand its usage and exposure away from its own website and apps. This off-Twitter usage is already a major part of Twitter’s overall usage, which the company seems to keep having to remind people (and investors) about.

Last week, Twitter gave bloggers another helpful tool with the launch of an official WordPress plugin. This includes Twitter Cards, Analytics, Embedded tweets and video, the tweet button, the follow button, Twitter advertising, and a base library. The company says the plugin will help sites grow their Twitter audiences.

Images via Twitter

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-gives-websites-video-embeds-2015-03/feed0ISIS Threatens to Kill Jack Dorsey, Twitter Employeeshttp://www.webpronews.com/isis-threatens-to-kill-jack-dorsey-twitter-employees-2015-03
http://www.webpronews.com/isis-threatens-to-kill-jack-dorsey-twitter-employees-2015-03#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 14:34:24 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418707This weekend, someone writing on behalf of ISIS threatened Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and all Twitter employees, calling on supporters to not “allow any one of the atheists to survive.”

A post claiming to be in response to Twitter’s “campaign to delete accounts” specifically addresses Dorsey, who appears with superimposed crosshairs over his face.

“You started this failed war,” the ISIS post says. “We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn’t get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back,” reads the message. “But when our lions [brave men] come and take your breath, you will never come back to life.”

It’s Twitter’s policy to suspend accounts that promote ISIS activity.

The post calls on ISIS supporters across the world to target Twitter and its employees.

“For the ‘individual jihadi’ all over the world, target the Twitter company and its interests in any place, people, and buildings, and don’t allow any one of the atheists to survive,” it says.

“Our security team is investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed.

This isn’t the first time Twitter employees have been targeted by ISIS. CEO Dick Costolo revealed last year that he and other employees had received death threats.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/isis-threatens-to-kill-jack-dorsey-twitter-employees-2015-03/feed0Live Long And Prosper: Internet Collectively Mourns An Iconhttp://www.webpronews.com/live-long-and-prosper-internet-collectively-mourns-an-icon-2015-03
http://www.webpronews.com/live-long-and-prosper-internet-collectively-mourns-an-icon-2015-03#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 03:43:04 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418628“Live long and prosper” was Spock’s catch phrase on Star Trek and is a phrase that became the mantra for generations of nerds and outsiders.

Live long and prosper. Leonard Nimoy accomplished both goals in his lifetime, especially if one counts admirers for riches, and it is certain that he did.

Leonard Nimoy even signed off many of his various tweets and posts with, “Live long and prosper.”

That is why, all weekend, the internet has woven “Live long and prosper”, or #LLAP into its fickle, trending vernacular.

Fans, friends, colleagues, and co-stars alike have paid tribute to Leonard Nimoy, who died on Friday at 83 from complications due to COPD.

Many of those tributes have included “Live long and prosper” in one way or another, or #LLAP.

Some are touching, some are comical, but all show a deep gratitude and admiration for the man who left the people of earth with the gift of Spock.

Isn’t it great when an entire nation can come together over the resonant loss of an icon like Leonard Nimoy? “Live long and prosper” becomes something we wish for each other. At least for a day or two.

What do you think about the heartwarming “Live long and prosper” tributes pouring out across the nation?

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/live-long-and-prosper-internet-collectively-mourns-an-icon-2015-03/feed0Kanye West Drops New Album Title On Twitterhttp://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-drops-new-album-title-on-twitter-2015-03
http://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-drops-new-album-title-on-twitter-2015-03#commentsSun, 01 Mar 2015 13:10:35 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418558Kanye West tweeted out his new album title on Saturday evening.

In series of tweets, Kanye introduced his new album.

Kanye West started with a tweet that read, “New Album title….”, then “So Help Me God”, which we can assume is the title of his new album, not an assurance of his intention to release said album title.

Catchy.

This new revelation from Kanye West comes after simultaneous apologies to Beck and Bruno Mars, both of whom he has insulted in recent history, probably among many others.

I could be wrong and I don’t want to downgrade a rare apology from Kanye West. So, I guess I will leave it up to Beck and Bruno Mars to accept.

It certainly seems like Kanye West has found success in apologizing to Taylor Swift, since that’s who he was with when he decided to apologize to Beck.

In an interview with BBC 1 Radio, Kanye West admits that Beck is pretty amazing, after all.

He said, “I was ironically having dinner with Taylor Swift [and] the Beck song starts playing, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really good; maybe I might’ve been wrong.’”

Kanye West’s “maybe” and “might have” don’t reek of regret, but in Kanye’s case, that’s probably as good as it gets.

What do you think about Kanye West’s new album title and his (pseudo) apologies?

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-drops-new-album-title-on-twitter-2015-03/feed0Kanye West Tweets Apology to Beck, Thank Godhttp://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-tweets-apology-to-beck-thank-god-2015-02
http://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-tweets-apology-to-beck-thank-god-2015-02#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 16:09:52 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418403]]>While everyone was losing their damn minds over that dress Thursday evening, Kanye finally apologized to Beck on Twitter. I, for one, finally had a good night of sleep – my first since the Grammys.

“I would like to publicly apologize to Beck, I’m sorry Beck,” said Kanye.

Kanye made headlines when he ran onstage at this year’s Grammys when Beck won Album of the Year, in an apparent repeat of his infamous “Imma let you finish” moment at a previous Grammys involving Taylor Swift. Kanye didn’t end up making a scene at Beck’s expense, but later in an interview questioned Beck’s win and said he needed to “respect artistry.”

All is right in the world. And that damned dress is blue. End of story.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/kanye-west-tweets-apology-to-beck-thank-god-2015-02/feed0Twitter Advertisers Get New Conversion Tracking Featureshttp://www.webpronews.com/twitter-advertisers-get-new-conversion-tracking-features-2015-02
http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-advertisers-get-new-conversion-tracking-features-2015-02#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 15:47:21 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418399Twitter just added a couple of new features to conversion tracking for web. Advertisers can now take advantage of support for transaction values and key conversion tags.

The former lets advertisers view the sales that their Promoted Tweet campaigns drove.

“If you’ve implemented our website tag already, you can make some simple changes to the tag to start collecting conversion values and order quantities for each conversion,” says product manager Abhishek Shrivastava. “These values are aggregated and reported back in your Twitter Ads analytics dashboard to provide insights on your ROI from your Promoted Tweet campaigns. If you aren’t using conversion tracking yet, it’s easy to get started by creating a tag in your Twitter Ads UI and implementing it within your site.”

“Over the last several months, we’ve seen positive results from advertisers who have tested the transaction values feature in beta,” says Shrivastava. “One is @WavesAudioLtd, which found that it’s shedding new light on the business results they are driving with Twitter Ads. Waves Audio provides audio solutions for the professional, broadcast and consumer electronics markets. In the 30 days from mid-December through mid-January, Waves Audio built New Year holiday excitement on Twitter with special promotions on software plugins for sound engineers. The Waves Audio team used Twitter’s website clicks or conversions objective and targeting such as interests and tailored audiences to drive high-intent site visits.”

According to Twitter, that account’s analytics now show a 770% return on advertising investment from Twitter ads from that period.

They share a quote from Waves’ Online Marketing Manager David Corman: “We’re very pleased with our return on investment in Twitter Ads. We’re able to develop strong relationships with a community of audio enthusiasts on Twitter, and the recent enhancements to Twitter’s analytics and measurement are helping us refine our outreach for maximum effectiveness.”

Twitter said Live Nation was able to achieve a a return on ad investment of 819% during a testing period while using a website card.

Advertisers can use the new key conversion tag to choose one conversion event for the campaigns they want to optimize, and view “distilled” analytics within the Twitter Ads interface.

“Suppose a flower shop wants to use Twitter Ads to drive more sales of their Easter bouquets,” says Shrivastava. “Once the shop places a website tag on the final conversion page for the bouquet and selects that tag as the key tag for their campaign, Twitter can automatically start to optimize the campaign towards driving more conversions on the bouquet sale page. The shop will also have the ability to view the number of bouquet purchases in their Twitter Ads analytics dashboard, as soon as those conversions occur. Because Twitter conversion tracking works in a cross-device fashion, even if a user sees the flower shop’s ad on a mobile device but later converts on a desktop, Twitter Ads analytics will be able to track and report that conversion.”

This is all now available to all Twitter advertisers globally.

Earlier this month, Twitter launched Quick Promote for advertisers to promote their best performing tweets from the Tweet Activity dashboard.

This is available to all SMB advertisers.

Twitter also announced syndicated promoted tweets this month, which see Twitter ads appearing on third party sites. This started with launch partners Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. We recently spoke with the CEO of The Mobile Majority, who thinks this will be detrimental to ad creativity. More on that here.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-advertisers-get-new-conversion-tracking-features-2015-02/feed0Twitter Says It’s Tripled the Team Handling Abuse Reportshttp://www.webpronews.com/twitter-says-its-tripled-the-team-handling-abuse-reports-2015-02
http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-says-its-tripled-the-team-handling-abuse-reports-2015-02#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 21:35:07 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418360Twitter has a big problem with abuse. Everyone knows this. The company’s CEO knows this. The management team at Twitter knows something has to be done about it. But what is Twitter going to do about all the abuse and harassment that takes place on the site?

Incremental changes, for now.

Twitter has just provided an update on safety features concerning abuse and harassment, claiming to be fielding many, many more abuse reports since it streamlined the reporting process late last year. On top of that, Twitter says it’s tripled the size of the team handling these abuse reports.

“Over the last six months, in addition to the product changes, we have overhauled how we review user reports about abuse. As an example, allowing bystanders to report abuse – which can now be done for reports of private information and impersonation as well – involved not only an update to our in-product reporting process, but significant changes to our tools, processes and staffing behind the scenes. Overall, we now review five times as many user reports as we did previously, and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports,” says Twitter VP of User Services Tina Bhatnagar.

But that hasn’t fixed the problem – a problem which, at least at thus point, seems unfixable. Manageable, maybe. But you’re never going to completely protect hundreds of millions of people from abuse on the internet. You can try to mitigate it, however.

Twitter is now streamlining the reporting of impersonation, self-harm and the sharing of private and confidential information – just like it did with harassment and abuse.

They’re also doing something new when it comes to punishing those who break the rules.They’re making it harder to be a repeat offender.

“We are also beginning to add several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate our rules. These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users – but they give us new options for acting against the accounts that don’t follow the rules and serve to discourage behavior that goes against our policies,” says Bhatnagar.

Specifically, Twitter is going to start using phone numbers to track users who’ve been suspended for abusive behavior. Twitter may now ask for users to verify their phone number in order to reinstate their suspended account. Twitter can then check these numbers against a database of banned users. Of course, this doesn’t tackle the problem of people simply creating a new account altogether (you just need an email address for that). But it helps.

Twitter is looking to make it hard for troll, if it can’t outright silence them. Listen to what CEO Dick Costolo had to say in a recent New York Times interview:

“We’ve always taken [abuse] seriously. We’ve drawn a line on what constitutes harassment and abuse. I believe that we haven’t yet drawn that line to put the cost of dealing with harassment on those doing the harassing. It shouldn’t be the person who’s being harassed who has to do a lot of work.

“One way of thinking about it is: I may have a right to say something, but I don’t have a right to stand in your living room and scream it into your ear five times in a row. Right? I think there are things you can do on the platform that are of varying degrees of severity — not just black and white.”

Making abuse reports a bigger priority and assigning more people to deal with them is definitely helpful, as you’d think it would lessen the turnaround time from moment of reporting to Twitter taking action. But Twitter can suspend all the accounts it wants and make it hard for people to find a way back on Twitter – people will find a way to harass if they really want to.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-says-its-tripled-the-team-handling-abuse-reports-2015-02/feed0CPAC Asks Twitter for Questions and Things Go Predictably Awryhttp://www.webpronews.com/cpac-asks-twitter-for-questions-and-things-go-predictably-awry-2015-02
http://www.webpronews.com/cpac-asks-twitter-for-questions-and-things-go-predictably-awry-2015-02#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 17:12:08 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418345The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing, and conservatives all over the country are looking to see what the conservative political agenda will be for the next year. One of the early items on the agenda must have been better engaging the voting population via social media, because CPAC asked Twitter to formulate questions for today’s featured speakers:

Things quickly went awry.

#CPACQ has been trending for hours. I mean, what did they expect?

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/cpac-asks-twitter-for-questions-and-things-go-predictably-awry-2015-02/feed0Twitter Now Has An Official WordPress Pluginhttp://www.webpronews.com/twitter-now-has-an-official-wordpress-plugin-2015-02
http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-now-has-an-official-wordpress-plugin-2015-02#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 16:13:18 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=418302Twitter announced the release of its official WordPress plugin, which brings various Twitter features and functionality together into one package for WordPress sites.

Included are Twitter Cards, Analytics, Embedded tweets and video, the tweet button, the follow button, Twitter advertising, and a base library.

“We created this plugin to serve the common needs of most modern publishers while allowing for extensibility and WordPress API integrations by other WordPress plugins or site-specific customizations,” says Twitter developer advocate Niall Kennedy. “All Twitter JavaScript is loaded through WordPress resource managers for optimized execution. Twitter Cards are customized by post format and post type. Sharing options are only presented for a public post status. The plugin is globally available in 28 languages. If you’re a PHP or WordPress developer interested in learning more,our full plugin code, including underlying PHP libraries, is available on GitHub under the MIT license.”

The company says the plugin will help sites grow their Twitter audiences.

For Cards, the plugin automatically generates them for your webpages to highlight content you’ve shared.

WordPress 4.1 “Dinah” helps you focus on your writing, and the new Twenty Fifteen theme lets you show it off in style http://t.co/swKBJjFy0G

Cards must be enabled on your domain before they appear alongside a tweet. You can submit a URL to the Twitter Cards validator to request Twitter add the card type for your domain.

The Analytics part lets you track your site and author Twitter accounts.

With the plugin, you can customize your embeds.

“Since there is unique content every day on Twitter, our new plugin for WordPress makes it easy to include an embedded Tweet on your website that matches your site design,” explains Kennedy. “Choose a widget theme, link color and border color from your WordPress administrative dashboard to visually integrate Tweets into your webpages and articles. We’ve also included support for video embeds to highlight Twitter video content.”

In an FAQ document, it notes that if your custom link color and border don’t appear in embdedded tweets or timelines, your site may have a content security policy blocking Twitter’s JavaScript from inserting your custom styling. It’s also possible that you configured an embedded timeline widget with a non-default link color. The widget configuration overrides your page/theme configuration.

You can add the tweet button to posts from the admin interface, and the plugin automatically configures it to include “the URL of the post, site and author Twitter accounts, custom share text and hashtags specific to each post.”

The plugin also makes it easy to add a follow button to your theme’s widget area or alongside author info, according to the company.

This is the example Twitter showed of a Nissan ad running in the Flipboard app:

Rob Emrich, CEO of The Mobile Majority, says Twitter is “torpedoing ad creativity” with this syndication.

Asked to explain this, he tells WebProNews, “As it stands, Twitter’s available ad units are limited to static images with text-based descriptions, links, and calls-to-action. This offering doesn’t take advantage of the capabilities of mobile devices which can provide consumers with richer creative and increased functionality.”

“In essence, users would be limited to seeing a static Twitter ad on a third-party site, clicking a button or link, and being taken to another site or app to continue the experience,” he says. “When compared to rich-media alternatives like inline video, add-to-calendar, and mini-games, it’s easy to imagine which people would rather engage with.”

“That said, there is a high likelihood Twitter will also expand their newly introduced Promoted Videos outside the app’s feed and within publisher’s sites – a step in the right direction.”

“According to this Marketing Land article, ad quality is three times more effective at driving sales than an effective media plan, five times more effective at driving ad awareness than targeting, and delivers better engagement and brand lift,” says Emrich. “Put simply: creative is the most important leverage point mobile marketers have to make an impact on their campaigns’ results.”

“If an ad is interesting and looks good, humans will be more inclined to interact with it,” he says. “They’re more likely to remember the experience later. They are also more likely to share it, pass it along, and bring it up in conversation with other humans.”

Will the ease of Twitter’s product ultimately reduce the effectiveness of advertisers’ campaigns?

How can traditional advertisers find initial value from Twitter’s new syndication?

“For smaller businesses looking to dip their toes in social and insert those same efforts into other digital properties, Twitter offers a lot of efficiencies,” he says. “Rather than duplicating copy and reformatting images across multiple platforms, Twitter allows advertisers to build it once and run in multiple formats. Less savvy traditional marketers may also see an opportunity to grow their own social followings from outside the Twitter ecosystem. Without a consistent social engagement plan, however, they may end up paying to build an asset that goes under-utilized.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how Twitter expands its syndication program, and how big its roster of partners gets.

“Due to brand recognition and public awareness of the platform, Twitter should have no problem expanding the number of networks and sites that want to work with them,” says Emrich. “The other side of the coin is that Twitter pays publishers for their inventory. As a result, we may see some pricing adjustments to current inventory sources (such as Google) as the market and new supply side platforms (like Twitter) expand their reach.”

Upon announcing syndicated Promoted Tweets, Twitter said that in the third quarter of 2014, there were about 185 billion tweet impressions off of Twitter.

“For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience. Twitter syndicated ads will be seen by users within Twitter content sections on third-party properties, as well as within third-party content areas,” said Ameet Ranadive, Senior Director of Product.

The company says it sees the syndication as an opportunity for marketers to increase their capacity for large-scale ad campaigns on an “almost infinite” basis. The more syndication partners Twitter picks up, the more that will be true.